Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/News and notes



The English Wikipedia reached five million articles on November 1 with the article Persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia. The article was created by Cas Liber, an Australian Wikipedian who has been editing since 2006. He has created and edited a number of Featured Articles on similar topics and is active in projects like WikiProject Fungi and WikiProject Plants. Liber was one of a number of editors submitting articles around the same time to try to hit the milestone. He wrote "I tried to pick articles I could get to FA status at some point...to show the world that we could FAC the 5000000th." No free image of Persoonia terminalis is currently available, but a number of Wikipedians have independently contacted an Australian photographer who posted copyrighted images of the shrub's two subspecies to Flickr.

The event has been marked by a Wikimedia blog post and a letter from the community, which is reproduced here.



Brief notes

 * Election season: A three-person Electoral Commission consisting of, , has been appointed to oversee the December Arbitration Committee Elections.  The nominating period for ArbCom candidates begins on November 8 and voting begins on November 23.
 * Another milestone: On October 29, Wikidata celebrated its third birthday.
 * Sad news from Pakistan: Pakistani Wikimedian Khalid Mahmood, reportedly the most active user on the Western Punjabi Wikipedia, has died.  He was that Wikipedia's only administrator.  He created nearly 10,000 articles and had almost 50,000 edits, about one third of the total articles and one tenth of the total edits on that encyclopedia.